Where to get innovative ideas for your business if everything has already been invented?

This is a series of articles about digital transformation and creating high-demand IT products that truly help businesses become more competitive.

We’ll talk about how we turn ideas and business challenges into digital products that will interest your customers and become part of your value proposition, even if you have always considered yourself a very offline business. In this article, I will describe the very beginning of this process — how to find ideas for innovations in your business based on the Theory of Systems.

Situations when businesses feel the need to create something new, including some kind of new online platforms, applications, or ecosystems, are usually the following:

- Clients want faster, more modern, and more comfortable interfaces, ways of communication and receiving services and goods;
- You see that by changing the structure of your business, you can earn more;
- The company’s management infrastructure is outdated and slows down growth;
- Tech-savvy competitors appear and use platforms and digital business models to take a piece of the market;
- More and more often you hear that competitors have convenient applications that are faster, easier, cheaper, and just better than yours.

Where to start?
There are many step-by-step instructions and trendy methods described online, but they are often very superficial and simplify thinking significantly, therefore the products come out primitive, basic. To create truly innovative products, you need to be able to go beyond templates. That’s why I want to talk about a universal and fundamental approach that can be applied to different situations. And even if this approach won’t guarantee success, it will in the very least significantly reduce risks and turn designing a new product a predictable and systematic process.

First, there will be a boring definition of “system”. But then I will explain in pictures how this definition makes our approach simple and useful, and we’ll use it to come up with an idea for innovation right on the spot.

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What is a system?
“A system is a cohesive conglomeration of interrelated and interdependent parts, isolated from the environment, interacting with it as a whole”.

What value does this definition give us?

1. Businesses, organizations, competitors, products, services, and even values ​​can be viewed as a system and taken apart into elements and relationships. This will provide an opportunity to see the strengths and weaknesses of the current situation.

2. Determine the boundaries of where our system is, and where another system starts. This helps later in development, for example for the first versions of products, an MVP, so as not to implement anything irrelevant.

3. Work systematically, not relying on chance, and get a predictable result. Considerably reduce the risk of missing something important and overlooking a potentially profitable opportunity.

For instance:
They say ideas are always around us, and I am writing this article sitting in a coworking space, so let’s look for ideas right here. There are usually a lot of developers and designers around here. They all create some kind of IT systems, but now it’s late evening and I can think in silence.

Let’s describe my situation as a system.

What elements are surrounding me?

Me, a table, a chair, a laptop, a telephone, an outlet, a charger, a cup of coffee, something else. Enough for a start.

When we say that the system is the workplace then the boundaries of the system immediately become clear. Obviously, the microcosm of the workplace is very important and maybe even more important than the entire coworking space in general, simply because I spend 80% of the time in this place. We feel that the workplace is something integral and even when the table has no borders, we understand where my space ends and someone else’s begins.

Now our attention isn’t all over the place anymore, instead, it’s focused only on this local system. This means we can concentrate on my experience of using this particular place and look for potential improvements. Moreover, we can understand how this place, as something integral, interacts with neighboring systems or with coworking in general (we can describe the effect of light from a window, noise, access to common sockets, etc.).

As soon as we have listed the elements of the system, we can start describing how these elements are related to each other within the system.

Having described these connections, we can study step by step how the elements interact with each other. This is partially demonstrated in the picture, but you can use a table of interactions. We need to write down the effects of some objects over others. As you understand, interaction is two-way communication, so we write down how the laptop affects the table and how the table affects the laptop. This is a very important point.

We talked in detail about this type of analysis here, now I will just say that you need to write out actions in a special formulation as “verb + object + context”.

For instance:
Put the laptop on the table.
Hold the laptop firmly on the table.
Move the chair under the table.
Connect to the internet.
Charge devices.
And so on….

If you describe the system in detail, it turns out that even in such a simple situation as being in a coworking space, we have a lot of needs, tasks, as well as micro-actions that should ensure the fulfillment of these needs or tasks.

Each of these micro-actions can become a reason for improvement or even innovation.

What useful idea can you come up with?
Let’s take one of the tasks — to charge the devices.

To start the process of inventing, I suggest using another analysis tool — trend analysis, the study of how systems change. When we start describing trends, thoughts about a better future come naturally. My thought process looks like this:

I thought about how the devices are charging now. It requires a charger, sockets, and wires that occupied most of the table. Let’s see if there is any trend in charging methods:

Previously, charging was only through a wall socket.
Then through the socket embedded right in the table.
Now we have wireless chargers.
Can we assume that in the future we will only have wireless chargers? I think yes.

Idea:
Let’s get back to our system. The table currently has built-in sockets. But what if you use one of the innovative techniques, which is called combination (described here) — to connect a table and wireless chargers and assume that the entire surface of the table will become a wireless charger?

Looks like a concept? Wouldn’t it be convenient? They say Apple has already stopped completing its iPhones with wires and charges? Other brands have picked on Apple, but I’m sure they are already moving in the same direction. The idea is ready.

When you look at the world as a system and know how to design new projects systematically, then innovation ceases to be a miracle and becomes a designed and predictable result.

Of course, this is just the beginning. Now that we have the idea we need to look at it as … a new system. Describe it in detail, look at the negative and positive aspects (the complexity of technologies, compatibility, harmful radiation, fire hazard). Repeat the steps above and evolve the idea further. If you manage to solve all the technical limitations of this new system and balance the economics of the product, then you will get a much more pleasant workplace, which is a USP.

As for how to work with ideas, model the economics, and understand whether the product will sell, I will describe it in the following articles.